


million to one

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 21:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It could have gone another way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	million to one

For a moment, in the middle of his charge, everything makes sense: he understands the weapon in his hand and the wind on his face. But then he’s close enough to see the gold of her eyes, a solid ring around each glossy pupil, and he sees her expression change. She’s not smiling. She’s concentrating, her mouth a slash of blue. 

The air flies from his lungs.

“Gotcha,” he thinks she says, or maybe it’s goodbye. Her hand slides up the lance. Her hand is soft with light.

Her hand is still wrapped around the hilt when Tavros puts the point through her heart.

She dies surprised; she makes a sound, a little shocked hiss, and brings her hands halfway up to her ribs. She opens her mouth. Blood trickles from the corner, carving a darker trail through the sheen of her lipstick. When he left her on her quest bed she was a ruin, her bones barely contained by her disastrous skin, but now she could be anybody’s god. Except for the Javelinchpin sticking out of the sun on her chest, and the wetness on the inside of her cheek.

Her wings beat, once. Tavros feels her exhale. He lets go of the handle, of her hand, and she drops like a stone or a child. 

It’s dark in the asteroid. Without the shine of luck filling his eyes he can hardly see where the cliff ends. So he sits down next to her, instead, or collapses, really, his metal legs being kind of a mess, something inside of them gone long awry. He pulls himself painfully upright and wishes he had a rocket shuttle, a Rufio, or his old knees. He wishes he were far away, on a planet that doesn’t even really exist anymore, where a compass rose hung violet above the shallow sea. 

Vriska’s corpse, propped awkwardly on its tapering skewer, offers him no advice. He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t move her hair out of her sticky face. He doesn’t even really believe it; it just seems so unlikely, that he would be here, on his elbows beside a growing circle of blue.

(Her irides are still colorless beneath her painted lashes. When they FLARPed she used to wear blue contacts to make herself look more adult: she must have grown out of that, or just been loathe to compromise her one remaining eye.)

He has to get out of here. He has to go somewhere, anywhere, and tell someone what he did, until it turns real by being told. But first he wraps his arms around his steel shins. He closes his eyes to light and dark, and breathes the quiet in. 


End file.
